One man died and 10 other riders were hurt Friday when train cars filled with passengers broke loose from a locomotive in a dark tunnel on Disneyland's Big Thunder Mountain Railroad attraction. The accident occurred about 11:20 a.m. after the lead car, decorated to resemble a small red engine, and the open-top passenger cars sped through the faux desert landscape and uphill into a tunnel, where the cars separated and the locomotive derailed.

President Obama announced last week a new race-based initiative, My Brother's Keeper. According to the White House, the program will coordinate government agencies and private foundations to help young men and boys of color. "Of color" basically means blacks and Latinos. In fact, it's pretty obvious the program is aimed at young black men. This fact has invited some conservative criticism. The Weekly Standard's Terry Eastland notes that the program is likely unconstitutional.

June 2, 2012 | By Jessica P. Ogilvie, Special to the Los Angeles Times

In HBO's new show "Girls," creator Lena Dunham conjures up an image of young men so inundated with online porn that they almost unwittingly try to reenact it in their own boudoir escapades. The show is fictional, but Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo believes there's a lot of reality to it. In a new e-book, "The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Struggle and What We Can Do About It," written with Nikita Duncan, Zimbardo theorizes that all those hours spent in front of a screen - not just watching porn but playing video games too - is leaving men in the dust socially, unable to relate to women and unable to function in society.

HOMS, Syria - They appeared like a defeated army, gray blankets draping their shoulders, baggy clothes flowing over withered frames, faces gaunt and exhausted. At least half a dozen had lost limbs; others arrived in wheelchairs and on stretchers. Some wore bloody bandages. Many dragged heavily on cigarettes, like condemned men savoring their last smokes. "We couldn't stand it in there anymore," said Wassim, 23, a scraggly survivor seated Wednesday with other men at a glass-topped round table in a once-elegant banquet hall here, now a tattered makeshift shelter on the edge of a war zone.

Imagine that you walk into the newborn nursery ward at an American hospital and you see 100 babies in their bassinets. You are then informed that 33 of these babies will spend time in jail or prison. This is the reality today for African American males born in our country. As a black husband, father and physician, I am sick of it. So I asked the board of the private health foundation I lead for a three-month leave to investigate why opportunity and wellness elude so many of our black, Latino and Asian Pacific Islander sons.

It's a story line that's become so familiar over the years it hardly makes us blink: A gang member hunting down rivals kills an innocent kid. But the courtroom drama that unfolded last month left me unexpectedly troubled. The child, shot to death a year ago, was a toddler in his father's arms. The gang member who shot him was 15. He'd fired into a pack of strangers because someone had the wrong color on. He was sentenced to 90 years in prison in a courtroom heavy with outrage and grief.

Jesmyn Ward's heart-wrenching new memoir, "Men We Reaped," is a brilliant book about beauty and death. The beauty is in the bodies and the voices of the young men she grew up with in the towns of coastal Mississippi, where a kind of de facto segregation persists. There is C.J. Martin, one of her many cousins. "He was small and lean, angled all over with muscle," writes Ward. "His face was shaped like a triangle, and the only things that were dark about him were his eyes, which were so deep in color they were a surprise.

Ricky Lewis was driving along Florence Avenue on April 29, 1992, when the neighborhood erupted. "I saw all the crowds and thought, 'What is going on here?'" He was witnessing, as he soon learned, a defining moment in Los Angeles. The verdict had just landed in the trial of the officers who beat Rodney G. King senseless, and the rioting that followed would lead to dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries. Fires flared, businesses were looted, and National Guard and Marine units were called in. Lewis, a University of the Pacific graduate and member of the predominantly black Omega Psi Phi fraternity, lived in South L.A., and he understood the reaction to the verdict as well as how the long cycle of economic decline in the neighborhood fueled the anger.

They moved through the night with names like "the Birds. " The fight was primal, about survival from block to block. But at the same time, it was fun for the young men of Misurata, an adrenaline rush, like a Jean-Claude Van Damme film come to life. From the gang leader who loved to peer at Moammar Kadafi's snipers through night-vision goggles, to the teenage fisherman who became the booby-trap king, to the young medical student who rode shotgun in his green scrubs, they were suddenly action heroes in a city under siege.

WASHINGTON - President Obama will launch an initiative aimed at improving the lives of young black and Latino men by bringing businesses and foundations together with government agencies to change what an administration official called the "school-to-prison pipeline. " Obama plans to unveil the initiative, called My Brother's Keeper, on Thursday. The move is the latest in a series of efforts by the president to spur social change outside the stalemated legislative process, and represents an escalation of his efforts to target the problems faced by young men of color.

WASHINGTON - President Obama will launch an initiative aimed at improving the lives of young black and Latino men by bringing businesses and foundations together with government agencies to change what an administration official called the "school-to-prison pipeline. " Obama plans to unveil the initiative, called My Brother's Keeper, on Thursday. The move is the latest in a series of efforts by the president to spur social change outside the stalemated legislative process, and represents an escalation of his efforts to target the problems faced by young men of color.

Re “Boosting young men of color,” Opinion, Oct. 17 Author Robert Ross eloquently articulates an issue that Angelenos have blatantly ignored for too long. The life challenges of our young men of color are distressing on many levels, and they continue to cry for help and hope. The $50-million investment from the California Endowment is a generous investment, but solving this problem will require everyone to play an active role in investing in our young men. Tyrone Howard Los Angeles The writer is the director of the UCLA Black Male Institute.

Imagine that you walk into the newborn nursery ward at an American hospital and you see 100 babies in their bassinets. You are then informed that 33 of these babies will spend time in jail or prison. This is the reality today for African American males born in our country. As a black husband, father and physician, I am sick of it. So I asked the board of the private health foundation I lead for a three-month leave to investigate why opportunity and wellness elude so many of our black, Latino and Asian Pacific Islander sons.

Ricky Lewis was driving along Florence Avenue on April 29, 1992, when the neighborhood erupted. "I saw all the crowds and thought, 'What is going on here?'" He was witnessing, as he soon learned, a defining moment in Los Angeles. The verdict had just landed in the trial of the officers who beat Rodney G. King senseless, and the rioting that followed would lead to dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries. Fires flared, businesses were looted, and National Guard and Marine units were called in. Lewis, a University of the Pacific graduate and member of the predominantly black Omega Psi Phi fraternity, lived in South L.A., and he understood the reaction to the verdict as well as how the long cycle of economic decline in the neighborhood fueled the anger.

California's largest healthcare foundation Wednesday announced a $50-million initiative to support minority boys and young men, saying the odds against their succeeding in school and in future careers were staggering. The California Endowment said the seven-year project would aim to boost attendance 30% in targeted schools, reduce by half the number of those suspended, train campus police on the effect of trauma on students, establish conflict-resolution programs in 10 communities, develop 1,000 youth leaders and make sure all eligible children have health coverage.

Jesmyn Ward's heart-wrenching new memoir, "Men We Reaped," is a brilliant book about beauty and death. The beauty is in the bodies and the voices of the young men she grew up with in the towns of coastal Mississippi, where a kind of de facto segregation persists. There is C.J. Martin, one of her many cousins. "He was small and lean, angled all over with muscle," writes Ward. "His face was shaped like a triangle, and the only things that were dark about him were his eyes, which were so deep in color they were a surprise.

La Gaviota is a graceless homemade rowboat of ill-sawed timber and tired green canvas that will never look like its seagull namesake. But on the rocky beach here Monday, six friends labored mightily to make their craft seaworthy--for they plan to bet their lives on it. This morning they almost certainly will be between hope and desperation in the Florida Straits. In the chronicle of a failing revolution, it is a time of the young men and the sea.

Three young men armed with semiautomatic handguns forced their way into a bank vault Friday morning and escaped with an undisclosed amount of cash, authorities said. No one was injured in the 10 a.m. robbery of the Bank of America at 43501 13th Street. The robbers--between 15 and 24 years old--fled in a blue four-door car, authorities said.

Along with barked orders and the whine of chain saws, the clank of steel on rock was certainly one of the sounds that rose from a hillside near Yarnell, Ariz., last month as clouds of superheated smoke roiled the sky, portending a tragedy. One morning a dozen years ago, I heard an opportunity in that sound. "Hold up a second," I said. My son Rob, 12 at the time, gave me a withering look and kept stomping on the pedals of his mountain bike. It was pushing 90 degrees in the Southern California foothills that spill from forested mountains into San Bernardino, and Rob had no interest in losing our plodding upward momentum.

Nearly naked young men are probably not what Ernst & Young was hoping would come to mind when it changed its name to EY. Perhaps the accounting firm should have run a Google image search first. Doing so would have brought up a host of steamy pictures of scantily clad young men gazing into the cameras with sultry looks. PHOTOS: The 10 biggest tech gadget fails As reported by my colleague Ricardo Lopez, the photos are from EY! Magateen, which apparently celebrates young men and their bodies.